The Screengrab : rodney dangerfield

Night of the Living Dead Comedians: The Farrelly Brothers' "Three Stooges" and Its Predecessors

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:45:00 GMT

The news that the Farrelly Brothers are going ahead with their proposed Three Stooges movie, with a dream cast that includes Sean Penn, (probably) Jim Carrey, and (keep your fingers crossed) Benecio del Toro), is the latest sign that even the people who make movies think they don't make them like they used to. Especially since the official invention of "pop culture" at some point around 1967, moviemakers have found it harder and harder to leave well enough alone and resist the temptation to bring back their old favorites. This is the dark, deranged side of the comebacks that directors like Quentin Tarantino and Darren Aronofsky have deliberately engineered for actors they like, such as John Travolta, Pam Grier, and Mickey Rourke, who have slipped from the A-list or, as in the case of Grier, never really had the chance at a role worthy of them when they were cult favorites. It may also be the next stage of decadence after movies like Peter Bogdanovich's 1975 At Long Last Love, a nostalgic attempt to create a 1930s musical comedy with Cole Porter score, as if it had just been found in a time capsule where it had lain slumbering for forty years, even though it inexplicably starred Burt Reynolds and Cybil Shepard. In 1995, Robert Zemeckis, a director who never met a technological gimmick he didn't like, used what then seemed like exciting new computer wizardry to make an episode of the HBO TV series Tales from the Crypt "starring" Humphrey Bogart; Bogart had to play a corpse, though, because the computers that snipped clips of him our of his old movies and inserted him into Zemeckis's new footage couldn't get his frozen face to move. Voiceover narration was supplied by Robert Saachi, an actor whose whole career is based on his physical and vocal resemblance to Bogart: he starred in a 1980 period detective movie called The Man with Bogart's Face, whose plot and supporting cast of characters were derived from assorted Bogart classics. More recently, the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a period fantasy that wore its computer-generated artificiality on its sleeve, used some old footage to have Laurence Olivier "play" its villain, though once again the dead star was unable to interact with the rest of the cast while unknowingly and involuntarily having one more bad movie added his IMDB page.

Of all dead stars, it makes sense that comedians would lead the league when it comes to inspiring people to want to bring them back. Many a kid has taken the first baby steps towards full-blown geekdom by working up imitations of some performer who's made him or her laugh. And laughter can make you feel so close to a performer that it's only natural to want more from them than we can ever get, especially in the case of those who were in an advanced state of rigor before some of their current fans were even born. In his comic book series Cerebus, which ran for 300 issues from 1977 to 2004, the writer-cartoonist Dave Sim paid affectionate, parodic tribute to a vast array of pop culture figures, ranging from Rodney Dangerfield and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to Oscar Wilde and assorted Looney Tunes characters, by basing supporting players on their physical appearances and capturing their speech patterns, mating the perfect pitch of a perfect mimic to a true satirist's gift for being funny in character. The first real sign that Sim might be possessed of genius came when he introduced "Lord Julius", a major Cerebus character based on Groucho Marx, and proceeded to demonstrate that writing convincingly Grouchoesque dialogue was well within his range. Much later, the roped the Three Stooges into Cerebus, too. But Sim--like Paul Gulacy, another comics artist, who attracted some notoriety in the '70s and '80s for his habit of drawing movie performers (including Bogart and Woody Allen) into his strips--Sim didn't have to worry about whether his collaborators could hold up their end, or about making his resurrected stars believable in the flesh. Others who have tried to pull off what the Farrellys are shooting for have been...not so lucky.

BRAIN DONORS (1992)

Jerry (Rat Race) Zucker and his brother David (An American Carol) Zucker were the big wheels behind this movie, back around the time when they were still regarded, as well, the way the Farrellys are apparently regarded in the industry today. The idea was to revive Marx Brothers-style comedy using the script for A Night at the Opera as a base. Among other things, this resulted in a script credited as having been written by Pat Proft, the scribe of Police Academy and Bachelor Party, and suggested by George S, Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. (One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong...) The film stars John Turturro in the Groucho role, called Roland T. Flakfizer, because although Proft, in his rsearch, failed to grasp anything about how the Marx Brothers' comedy worked or how their characters were shaped, he did pick up on the funny name motif. The English comedian Mel Smith is supposed to be Chico, and someone named Bob Nelson, who was either encouraged to mug his ass off or suffered from a galvanic facial tic, is a surprisingly talkative Harpo figure. (There's also Nancy Marchand, who was unable to seem out of it convincingly enough to remind anyone of Margaret Dumont.) Directed by Dennis Dugan, a man who has reason to be very grateful for the career of Adam Sandler, Brain Donors shows little interest in aiming for the level of surreal verbal with that made Groucho and Chico living legends; instead, it concentrates on sloppy, mistimed slapstick, making it one of the few films that make you think, "Leslie Nielson did this a lot better--in Wrongfully Accused!" Because Proft read somewhere that the Marx Brothers were anarchic and subversive, whenever Turturro and company execute some sloppy, mistimed slapstick, some guy who looks as if he's played a lot of bankers in his time stands up, gets red in the face, and says something like, "I'm gonna get those guys, Ngggghhhh-ghhh!" Maybe Proft and Dugan were confused and thought that the Marx Brothers were three of the Little Rascals.

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF LAUREL AND HARDY: FOR LOVE OR MUMMY (1999)

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have always been one of the most fervently beloved slapstick comedy teams among real afficionados of comedy, though their profile among the public at large has shrunk a bit in recent years, maybe because their style and presence were so graceful and elegant that their work strikes modern audiences as slow and lacking in the energy that comes from real comic aggression. For the people who made this attempt to revive "Laurel and Hardy" as a trademark-- treating the performers as characters who could be incarnated by new actors, Gailard Sartain and Bronson Pinchot---that translates into family-fun innocuousness. What's missing, aside from the falling-domino intricacy of the real Laurel and Hardy's complicated routines and the ease with which they had learned to execute them after years of practice, is the real affection viewers come feel the two shared for each other: Sartain and Pinchot are just two talented guys who couldn't get a better gig and, between them, seem to have at least three eyes on the clock. As for what F. Murray Abraham is doing here, I'm not even sure I want to know. (I remember a time, back around his Oscar win for Amadeus, when you used to hear people snicker that Abraham was pompous and took himself too seriously. Maybe we should all go over to his house and apologize for that before he starts begging his agent to get him a job as a contestant on the next series of I Love New York.

STOOGEMANIA (1986)

This meager-budgeted comedy, starring the gifted Josh Mostel (who had one of his first high-profile roles standing in for John Belushi in Delta House, the "official" TV sitcom-rip-off of National Lampoon's Animal House), isn't actually an attempt to revive the Stooges but a "tribute" to them that doubles as the screen's major repository of Stooges imitations. Mostel plays a schlub named Howard F. Howard who seeks medical help for the Stooges fixation that is threatening to upend his life. Half-assed as the whole thing is, the movie has a few conceits--such as its visit to Los Angeles's dreaded "Stooge Row", populated with Stooge-imitating Stooges freaks who are on their last legs after having worn out their welcome in polite society--that might have been amusing if the thing weren't so underfunded and Mostel had had a little help to get it off the ground. It all plays out like a padded promotional video for Jump 'N The Saddle Band's 1983 novelty hit, "The Curly Shuffle."

The Stooges--comprised, in their glory years, of Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Moe's brother, the protean Curly--knew something themselves about the joys and sorrows of repackaging. They had started out in vaudeville supporting the tall, abrasive comedian Ted Healy, who in both his dress and demeanor suggested Bill O'Reilly playing Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. Originally, the third Stooge was Moe and Curly's brother Shemp Howard, but Shemp found getting yelled at and batted about the face by Ted Healy--a practice that Healy reportedly expected his employees to put up with whether they were on stage or off--such a joyless experience that he departed before the Stooges went to Hollywood. (Shemp and Moe both made their movie debuts in the 1919 Spring Fever, a short film in which they supported the baseball legend Honus Wagner.) The Stooges made Soup to Nuts, their first movie as a unit, complete with Healy and Curly, in 1930, four years before splitting off on their own.

The Stooges' golden era, the time they were making shorts for Columbia with Curly on board, lasted a little less than a dozen years. In 1945, Curly began slowing down, showing signs of the effects of his drinking and Christ knows how many hits to the head, and in 1946 he retired from the team after suffering a debilitating stroke. He was replaced by Shemp, who after his death in 1955 was in turn replaced by Joe Besser, who destablized the universe by brazenly violating the accepted terms of Stooge Law: Besser, when hit by Moe, insisted on hitting back. Columbia let their contract lapse in 1957, and that should have been the end of it. But when the Stooges were rediscovered by a new generation that saw their classic shorts on TV, they were given the opportunity to cash in, and the boys, who had never received princely wages in all their time at Columbia, needed the money. Now augmented by Joe DeRita--christened "Curly Joe" for Stooge purposes--instead of the retaliatory Besser, Moe and Larry would appear in a string of feature films, such as Have Rocket, Will Travel, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules and The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze. Compared to the shorts that made the Stooges beloved, they serve as cautionary examples for the Farrellys and their new Stooges, because they established certain new rules about just how long you can stand to watch people doing this stuff to each other. Not to mention just how long it's healthy for people to, you know, do this stuff to each other.

OST: "Beetlejuice"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Danny Elfman's reputation as a film composer, to put it politely, is mixed. To put it not so politely, there are a lot of people who think he sucks. Though Elfman himself -- a multiple Oscar nominee, a millionaire many times over, and Mr. Bridget Fonda -- probably doesn't pay his detractors any mind, there is a growing consensus that the man who started out as the most unlikely person to achieve success as a composer of scores for blockbuster Hollywood films has turned into a contemptible hack whose name in the opening credits is a sure sign of sonic disappointment ahead. Of course, for everyone who feels that way, there's also those who fiercely defend his scores as memorable, inventive, and distinct; how many other film composers can you name who have gold records for collections of their motion picture scores? Elfman has two of them, and a legion of devoted fans. This kind of vehement disagreement is, in fact, familiar to Danny Elfman: during the 1980s heyday of his band Oingo Boingo, opinion was roughly split between those who found him an obnoxious noisemaker whose danceable, horn-laden compositions were an embarrasment to the punk circles in which he traveled, and those who found his music creative, infectious, and a welcome change of pace from the business-as-usual of L.A. hardcore.

But as Elfman's career as a film composer enters its third decade, those who defend him are growing fewer, and those who attack him are growing more. The time at which his name in the credits alone was enough to make fans line up at the box office for a ticket are long behind him, and it seems the more he embraced his fame as a Hollywood name worthy of dropping, the more he moved from his ludic, sonically inventive early work to a sense of darkness and bombast that never quite suited him to what can only be described as hackwork in films like A Civil Action, Proof of Life and Red Dragon. The sad thing is, it was not always thus: Elfman got his start composing music for the films of his friend, fan and frequent collaborator, the director Tim Burton -- and the early work they produced together really was special. Back then, Elfman geniunely sounded like someone who might seriously change the game when it came to film scores: his utterly postmodern approach of mixing the high and the low, and his keen sense of comic and dramatic timing, which he used to blow the doors off scenes with a judicious application of musical cues, seemed to be indicators of someone who was there to do more than just collect a paycheck.

The best of Danny Elfman's early collaborations with Tim Burton was the fantastic score to Pee Wee's Big Adventure. A more perfect marriage of score and film is hard to imaging, and the opening sequence of the beloved comedy -- with Pee Wee's activities growing more and more absurd as the main theme becomes louder and louder, finally hammering away at a perfect comic crescendo -- is unforgettable. Unfortunately, the commercial release is marred by many omissions, and by being paired on a double release with Elfman's passable but unspectacular soundtrack to the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School. So, for Elfman aficianados who want to show off what the man was capable of before he started sleepwalking through his career, Beetlejuice is the default pick. Not that it's much of a step down from Pee Wee's Big Adventure; they're both showcases for his blend of acumen and absurdity, his sure comic timing, his ability to use odd percussive patterns and polyrhythms to such a listener into the scene, and his deft mixing of cartoonish exaggeration with clever and appropriate instrumentation. The ghostly conjurations of the score proved that Elfman, despite later evidence to the contrary, was capable of sounding sinister without taking himself too seriously, and its magical mixture of catchy melodic elements and almost avant-garde experimental sounds makes it a collection of music worth listening to even outside of the context of the movie -- the true test of any great score. Beetlejuice is the pinnacle of Elfman's work with Tim Burton, for good and for ill: it never got any better, and it would all be downhill from there.

BEST TRACKS: The famous opening theme to Beetlejuice is a perfect example of what Danny Elfman is capable of when he's not just out to make a buck. Its clever folding of Harry Belafonte's "The Banana Boat Song" into what becomes a whirling, sinister piece of music is funny and unexpected, and the rest of the piece plays out with excellent and energetic stings over a rapid-fire death train of increasing tempos. "Travel Music", with its conjuration of 1950s-style on-the-road dynamics and its simple innocence twisted by its underlying nastiness, works very well, as does the hilarious muzak-from-beyond-the-grave of "The Flier/Lydia's Pep Talk". The eerie "Incantation", with its high-strung percussion that blasts out into an explosion of creepy vocal cues, haunted-house organ and propulsive horns, nicely rounds out the score.

Related Posts:

OST: Enter the Dragon

OST: Conan the Barbarian

In Other Blogs: Freejackin'

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The snarky sports blog Deadspin isn’t generally one of our go-to sites here in the land of movie blogdom, but this post containing the text of Roger Ebert’s kiss-off to longtime Chicago Sun-Times sportswriter/annoying douchebag Jay Mariotti is too good to pass up. “What an ugly way to leave the Sun-Times. It does not speak well for you. Your timing was exquisite. You signed a new contract, waited until days after the newspaper had paid for your trip to Beijing at great cost, and then resigned with a two-word e-mail: ‘I quit.’ You saved your explanation for a local television station. As someone who was working here for 24 years before you arrived, I think you owed us more than that. You owed us decency. The fact that you saved your attack for TV only completes our portrait of you as a rat…On your way out, don't let the door bang you on the ass.”

Are you a cinephile or a cinemaniac? Do you even know the difference? David Bordwell thinks he does. “What is cinephilia? Literally, the love of film. But everybody likes, even loves film, no? The term 'cinephilia' connotes an overwhelming passion for film, even an obsession about it. And not just particular films. I meet civilians all the time who are devoted to their favorites—The Godfather, The Princess Bride, The Matrix. But they’re not cinephiles. So is it just a matter of quantity? Is it just that the cinephile enjoys a great many movies? Partly, but there’s still more to it. The cinephile displays symptoms of cinemania, as chronicled in the film of the same name…But I do see differences. For one thing, most cinemaniacs like only certain sorts of movies—usually American, often silent, sometimes foreign, seldom documentaries. Do cinemaniacs line up for Brakhage or Frederick Wiseman? My sense is not. Cinephiles by contrast tend to be ecumenical. Indeed, many take pride in the intergalactic breadth of their tastes. Look at any smart critic’s ten-best lists. You’ll usually see an eclectic mix of arthouse, pop, and experimental, including one or two titles you have never heard of. Obscurity is important; a cinephile is a connoisseur.”

Guest poster Aaron Aradillas looks back at the box office charts from 25 years ago at Some Came Running. Do you remember the number one movie from this week in 1983? “Easy Money was Rodney Dangerfield's follow-up to Caddyshack. It was pretty obvious that Rodney could carry a movie. The only problem was creating a vehicle where he could do his thing. Easy Money wasn't it…Easy Money finds Rodney playing more or less himself in that seemingly reliabe story of a cheerful vulgarian being forced to change his ways in order to receive a big reward. In this case it is Rodney's Monster-In-Law who is leaving him $10 million if he promises to stop drinking, smoking, gambling, and doing all the things we love Rodney for. For some reason filmmakers think this story is a perfect fit for high-wire comic actors. It isn't. It neuters them from doing what we go to see them do.”

At The House Next Door, Steven Boone has another look at Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath and makes a surprising connection. “Watching Day of Wrath for the second time at age 35 (in a crisp new digitally restored print at IFC Center), I now see much more E.T. than Schindler's List: There are no villains, no evil—just weak and fearful individuals either hiding from or within a system that provides the cruel certainty and definition of wrathful law pretending to justice. Everyone in Day of Wrath is only trying to be as human and honorable as he/she can be within the limits of a paranoiac theocracy. What appeared to my 19-year-old eyes to be a dour, cold-eyed vision of corrupt power destroying innocents in the name of God now appears as delicate and wise about human drives as that scene in E.T. where Elliot, so used to having no one to really talk to or play with, shows off his toys to the extra-terrestrial and prattles on like no tomorrow.”

In List-o-Mania, Topless Robot brings us the 10 Most Unnecessary Movie Tie-In Comics. How did I ever miss the Freejack comic book? “This sci-fi opus starring Emilio Estevez and Mick Jagger (when was the last time you heard those three words?) didn’t exactly wow moviegoers, possibly because ‘FreeJack’ sounds like a euphemism for public masturbation. Now Comics inexplicably put out an adaptation of the movie long after it had left theaters and was largely forgotten by the general populace. Strangely, Mick Jagger is a far better actor in the comic version.”

Summerfest '08: "Summer Rental"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Well, faithful Screengrab readers, we knew this day would come. When I first set myself the task of creating Summerfest '08 -- the season-long Screengrab movie festival of films with nothing in common except having the word "summer" in the title -- I knew it wouldn't be easy. I knew that, despite my humble goal of providing you with short, sassy reviews of movies just long enough to watch while your steaks were burning on the grill, I would eventually reach the dog days of August and, having suggested a movie every Wednesday for the last ten weeks, start running out of anything worth watching. With two weeks to go, Netflix can scarcely keep up with my bizarre demands, and while I'm doing my best to have this series go out with a bang, I'm afrad that by this point, I'm reduced to suggesting movies that are more or less the absolute dregs. And in terms of 1980s broad comedies, they don't come much dregsier than those movies with the following five words attached: 'a comedy featuring John Candy'. While the big man was an absolute ace on television (he was far and away our favorite part of SCTV) and could be a winning charmer in mainstream films (see Splash for evidence), his ability to pick good scripts was not honed to razor sharpness. This left us with a legacy, following his unfortunate demise, of very few characters like Johnny LaRue and Harry, the Guy with the Snake on His Face, and very many movies like Who's Harry Crumb?.

But we made a commitment here, damn it, and this is no time to flag. The final days are upon us! So screw your courage to the sticking-place, don a boater and a decades-out-of-date swimming costume, and join me for Summer Rental!

THE ACTION: In a sure sign we are watching a movie from the 1980s, John Candy plays a burnt-out air traffic controller who is forced to take a summer vacation before he completely flips out and starts steering 747s into one another. In an additional sure sign we are watching a movie from the 1980s, the whole movie is essentially a collection of gags that weren't quite good enough for a Rodney Dangerfield movie. The plot, such as it is, involves Candy and his family arriving at a summer beach house which unfortunately has been rezoned as public property, forcing them to contend with rude passers-by at whom they make threatening gestures and Smurf jokes -- yet a third sign that we are watching a movie from the 1980s, since the Smurf jokes are delivered with no apparent irony. After about an hour of these aimless, plotless jokes, the movie takes a new turn, delivering a brand new set of aimless, plotless jokes, this time revolving around a pointless combat between Candy and an old sea salt who runs a boating company and wants to make Candy's life miserable for no particular reason. Will the two ever become friends? Will Candy's kids drive him crazy? Will this movie seem like it will never end, despite being only 88 minutes long? Only you can decide, by renting this spectacularly pointless relic from a bygone age.

THE PLAYERS: Candy isn't exactly at his best here, but at least he retains elements of gregariousness and isn't entirely sleepwalking through the movie like he would the last few pictures he made prior to his untimely death. Unsurprisingly, his big-screen family gives him precious little to play off of, portrayed as they are by professional nonentity Karen Austin, never-was Kerri Green, and supremely irksome one-time heartthrob Joey "Whoa!" Lawrence. But later in the film, director Carl Reiner (yes, that Carl Reiner, several million years removed from his brilliant TV comedy days) brings in tons of good character actors for Candy to bounce off of, and the movie improves to a marked degree when he's trading lines with John Laroquette, Richard Crenna, and, as the film's main antagonist, Rip Torn, who was just then beginning to develop the hammy, over-the-top persona that would mark much of his best work in the 1990s and 2000s. Since the movie is little more than a collection of gags in search of a plot to bounce off of, it's better when those gags are bouncing off the likes of Torn, Crenna and Laroquette than the lives of Kerri Green.

SUMMER FUN: Almost the entire running time of Summer Rental takes place at the beach or on the ocean, and if it isn't fun for poor John Candy's long-suffering Jack Chester, at least everyone else is having fun at his expense. Fishing, sailing, surfing, and numerous semi-successful attempts at big-screen comedy jokes are all in abundance here, even if they're not always done right. At the very least, Candy does a lot of drinking, which is also our advice on how you should get through the movie.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: This being a good-time party movie of the 1980s, and its star being a big fat funster in the person of John Candy, Summer Rental has Hawaiian shirts everywhere you look. Crenna wears a Hawaiian shirt; Larroquette wears a Hawaiian shirt; and Rip Torn practically is a Hawaiian shirt. In addition, even when Candy isn't wearing a Hawaiian shirt, he's wearing something almost as good -- some of the few real laughs in the picture come from his outlandish wardrobe, including an outsized boater, hokey-looking Hollywood sunglasses, and a swimsuit that was made roughly during the Victorian era.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Once again, there are ways in which Summer Rental's being a cheap '80s comedy works against it -- for example, it's not very good, or very funny. But there are ways in which being a cheap '80s comedy works in its favor, and the greatest of these is its plethora of bikini babes. Unfortunately, one of them is Karen Austin, and another is Kerri Green, who, while not technically underage, will just bum you out about liking The Goonies. But another is the supermodel-turned-actress Lois Hamilton, who -- if you can forget that she, like Candy, died an unnatural death at a young age -- provides us with one of the movie's most memorable scenes. She pops up her bikini to reveal her, er, talents to Candy, and asks him, "How do they look?", to which he nervously replies "Similar?"